FantaSanremo Odyssey

The brief

FantaSanremo is February’s national hobby in Italy, and it arrives with its own crowd already assembled. So the brief was never to explain the Festival to anybody. It was to build the arcade game that Festival would have had, if it had shipped in 1985.

The singers are the characters. Piero Pelù, Emma, Dargen D’Amico, Carlo Conti — and Gianni Morandi holding a broom, a joke the audience got without being told. The enemies are the paparazzi: touch one and it slows you down and drains your life. The setting is the Riviera itself, its coloured houses rebuilt pixel by pixel, and the run is against the clock.

And then the part that makes it more than a game. Twenty-four trophies are hidden in it, and they unlock by doing things on FantaSanremo itself — building your team among them. The game does not keep the player: it hands them back to the product. That is gamification doing a job, not decorating one.

Results

The 1.7 million is FantaSanremo’s own count of registered users in 2024, not a number of ours — it is the size of the room the game was put into. Playing needs no team and no sign-up: the contest is optional, the game is not gated behind it. Fanpage covered the launch, and the piece is on our home page.

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